Blue Smoke

stand up to it. You need to stand up, too. Tell what happened.”
    “I was mad. I was mad because you were fighting again, and I didn’t want to go to school. So I didn’t.”
    Reena handed Trevor a tissue. “You came back home instead?”
    “I was just going to play in my room, and watch TV. But . . .”
    “You were feeling mad.”
    “They’re going to get a divorce.”
    “Oh, Trev.” William sat again. “It’s not because of you.”
    “You wrecked the house. That’s what Mom said. You’re wrecking it, so I thought if there was a fire, you’d stay home to fix it. But I didn’t mean it. I got matches and lit the pictures and the papers, then I couldn’t put it out. I got scared and I ran away. I had the note ’cause I wrote it on the computer before. And I went to school.”
    “This is all your fault,” Ella spat out.
    William took Trevor’s hand. “Sure, why not? Enough of it is. We’ll work through this, kiddo. It’s good you told the truth, and we’ll work through it.”
    “If the house got burned down, you won’t get divorced.” Trevor buried his face against his father’s chest. “Don’t go away.”
    S he got home late, and she got home depressed. There wasn’t going to be any perfect, or even easy, ending for Trevor Parker. Counseling would help, but it wouldn’t put his family back together. That, in Reena’s opinion, was doomed.

    Too many were as far as she could see.
    For every Fran and Jack, every Gib and Bianca, there were failed couples on the other part of the scale. And the failures generally outweighed the successes.
    The kid’s home might not have burned down, but it was sure as hell broken.
    She pulled up in front of her house, got out of the car, locked it. And saw Bo sitting on his front steps, nursing a bottle of beer.
    She nearly ignored him—everything about him said complicated and time-consuming. Simpler, she thought, just to go into her own house, close the door. And close out the hardship of the day.
    But she crossed over instead, sat down on the step beside him. She took his beer and had a good long drink.
    “If you’re going to tell me you’ve been sitting out here waiting for me, I’m going to get weirded out.”
    “Then I won’t tell you. But I can say that I’ve been known to take in a nice evening with a cold one on the front steps. Rough one?”
    “Sad one.”
    “Somebody die?”
    “No.” She passed the beer back to him. “Which is a question that forces me to put today in some perspective. A lot of time someone has. One thing you can’t come back from is death.”
    “What, no reincarnation in your world? Where’s the karma?”
    She smiled, which surprised her. “I didn’t deal with someone who may come back as a beagle today. Just some little kid who nearly burned his house down trying to keep his parents together.”
    “He hurt?”
    “Not physically, no.”
    “That’s something.”
    “Something. You said your parents split when you were a kid.”
    “Yeah.” He took a drink from the beer she passed back to him. “It was . . . unpleasant. Okay,” he corrected when she merely looked at him. “It was a nightmare. You don’t want to add to the weight of the day hearing about my childhood traumas.”

    “My parents have been married thirty-seven years. Sometimes they’re like one body with two heads. They fight, but it’s never ugly, if you get me.”
    “Oh boy, do I.”
    “I’d say they’re glued together, but you know what? They are the glue. Somehow the solidity of them is intimidating. Because you never want to settle for less than that.”
    “We could start out having dinner. See where it went from there.”
    “We could.” She took the bottle again, drank contemplatively. She could smell his soap, and a trace of something else. Maybe linseed oil, she thought. Something he might rub into wood.
    “Or we could just go inside and have some wild sex. That’s what you want.”
    “Well, rock and a hard place.” He gave a nervous little heh-heh, stretched out his legs. “I can’t say no, because—hey, guy here. So yeah, having wild sex with you would suit me fine. I thought about making love with you for seven-seventeenths of my life.”
    A quick, unladylike snort escaped her. “Seven-seventeenths?”
    “That’s rounded a little, but I figured it out. So getting to that in reality would be a big moment for me. On the other hand, I’ve thought about making love with you for seven-seventeenths of my